


Locked Room

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: ACD Canon References, Afterlife, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Desire, Episode: s01e01 A Study in Pink, Episode: s02e02 The Hounds of Baskerville, Ghosts, London beneath and between, Memories, Murder, Poison, Rivers, Story: The Adventure of the Speckled Band, bodies, dead detectives, locked room mysteries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 07:30:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2539493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Good day in the land of the dead.</p>
<p>There’s tea and the gears are turning and the game, Sherlock says from his perch, is on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Locked Room

_I found myself inside the bedroom. My companion noiselessly closed the shutters, moved the lamp onto the table, and cast his eyes round the room. All was as we had seen it in the daytime.--The Adventure of the Speckled Band_

 

Good day in the land of the dead. Sherlock is hunched inside himself like a crow and no-one is alive who shouldn’t be. Unseasonably warm. There’s tea and the gears are turning and the game, Sherlock says from his perch, is on.

Let me tell you a story.

**~**

It’s surprisingly easy, being, well, not alive. The crossing from the London I knew once (by way of Barts Hospital and the Helmand) was difficult; something about a coin and the Tyburn and the river of forgetting. Some pain in the scars and a kind of tearing. But you don’t forget everything, not really, and you can pass back and forth if you know how. I’ve learned that since. More than once.

**~**

I haven’t had to unlearn the battlefield.

“You miss it,” Mycroft said. Sherlock’s brother mourned him; Sherlock was hardly surprised when his power reached even here.

“Disappointing,” he said. Mycroft laughed. 

**~**

Sherlock passes back and forth like no-one else. Consulting detective, he said when I met him, only one in the underworld. He’s been gone some time. (A fall, he said it was, though what from he doesn’t say, or when he does say I don’t remember.)

I was shot. It’s a good match. I thought I had nothing to come home to.

I was wrong.

**~**

“What have we got today?” I ask Sherlock.

221B Baker Street, London and other London, is, it turns out, a catalyst, a portal, a kind of psychic bird-call, a psychogeographical hot spot of epic proportions. According to people who know these things, that is.

Sherlock rubs his hands together.

“Lestrade’s brought us something, an eight at least.”

Lestrade (who is by the way still alive, though he won’t be for long if keeps up with the Benson & Hedges) stopped over with his twin bloodhounds Rosie and Rue. (A gift from Sherlock he tells me, moor-strays abandoned halfway between.) It’s not as weird as you might think. A lot of cops have their hands in both worlds. Healers too (though I didn’t know I did at the time), morticians of course, pathologists, poets, practitioners of magic and science, the gifted, the sensitive, the cursed, the mad.

“Knew Sherlock when he was er, young,” Lestrade tells me, “believe me it wasn’t easy.”

“As if it is now,” I say, and Sherlock’s mouth turns up at one corner, reminds me what it was to be alive.

Now that’s a ghost of smile.

**~**

Mike Stamford (myocardial infarction) introduced us. I was having a bit of trouble accepting my dishonorable discharge from the only world I knew existed. Clung to the staff I’d carried over, leaned on it every step.

“You’re wrong,” Sherlock said. He twinkled, quite literally, at me over an alchemical nightmare on a lab bench at Barts;different though, quite a lot, from when I was alive. I remember that.

“You had some trouble in Afghanistan,” Sherlock said. “Care to see some more?”

I would. I did.

I left my makeshift cane on the living side, in a restaurant called Angelo’s (hummed with familiar energy, still does), didn’t look back.

**~**

The bedroom in the house in Surrey is suspiciously bloody.

“No living person could make that much of a mess.”

“Hmm,yes,” Sherlock says. “Wanted to make it look like a throat-slashing.”

“It wasn’t.”

He gives me the look I’ve come to know, the one that’s exactly the same this side of the divide and the other, both brows elevated just enough, rope on a tideline.

There’s no presence in the room.  

Julia Stoner is gone.

“How’d he get in, the murderer?”

Sherlock flaps, rubs sparks up his arms,

A matchstrike, phosphorous and brimstone, burnt hair.

“Now that’s the more interesting question.”

**~**

Some people are just gone when they go. I don’t think there was a chance of that with Sherlock.

“Oh no, dear,” Mrs. Hudson says. (Our landlady, and long gone, from natural causes, a traveller and former dancer and, unbeknownst to any in life, the keeper of quite a few of the keys to London’s underworld doors.)

“He was never going to do anything quietly, our Sherlock.”

She’s given one of those keys to him, in gratitude for keeping her drug-running American husband in a kind of specialised limbo.

“221B is bit of a puzzle, dear,” she told him; he told me some time after. “You’ll know what to do with it.”

**~**

He does, apparently. He does.

**~**

The bloody room case takes us to the morgue at Barts.

“Molly,” Sherlock whispers.

She shrieks a little when he touches her shoulder.

“Just because you’re a--whatever it is you are--doesn’t mean you can just barge in anytime you like.” She flushes when she says it, beautiful, the only living thing in the room.

No secret she thinks he’s beautiful too.

 “Ghosthood suits him,” Molly said to me once, and I couldn’t have disagreed.

“More so now you’re here,” she says.

She laughs at my morbid jokes (I'm allowed), rolls her eyes at Sherlock in his crow-black jacket, a dead man peering at a corpse, sometimes talking to a little knot of  fresh ghosts, telling them to stop being idiots, to leave their bodies behind, isn’t it obvious they’re deceased.

“Not to them,” I’ve told him, reminded him. Not yet.

**~**

Ghosts can get bored.

They, we, don’t rattle chains so much as well, other ghosts, each other, the living.

The dead can die. They can die again.

These are things I’ve learned.

The streets of London, other Londons, are laid under and over, woven like paper, like fabric, like time.

**~**

London cabbies, I’ve learned, memorise the dead addresses along with the living ones; it’s all there in the Knowledge. If you’re not careful to specify, though, they might take you to a long-gone postcode, where you’ll either recognize the shift, or you won’t.

Black coffee and tar. Pencil shavings and bergamot. Violets, bramble. Smoke and salt; gunpowder, arsenic, iodine. If you smell those things the dead are near. Or at least we are. I can tell you that.

Cabs, though, invisible cars. A case, our first. The one where I learned that the dead can murder the living, especially if the living aren’t very nice.

Sherlock was in danger and all I needed was my hand, the thought that became a bullet.

We tumbled back over the threshold laughing.

“Dinner?” Sherlock asked.

I was never hungrier.

**~**

“John!” Sherlock shouts. Ghosts can pound up stairs and tear off blankets as well as the living; they’re quicker at it too.

“Get up!”

Some mornings I’m fuzzy at first, about where I am, what I am, but it burns off like fog, this London, the other one too, meeting in the middle at the tolling of the bells. (St. Margaret’s, All Souls, St. Clement's; the ones I know best.)

Hair is still soft here and there are still smells. Breakfast. Fireplace. Earl Grey. Mildew on the spine of _Gray’s Anatomy_. Things still feel, well, life-fragile. Sometimes it’s as though we don’t have long. Another bullet, another fall, could end it, take us from each other, before we have the chance to not forget.

There’s at least one face (black brows, black suits) on the very edges of memory, that I’d rather not remember.

“Haven’t got all day!” Sherlock shouts, though he does.

“Where are we going?”

I’m still rubbing the sleep from my eyes when he pushes me into the cab.

**~**

The dead dream.

The dead eat and sing and talk and grieve. It’s no longer a mystery.

But there are still plenty of those.

**~**

“Oh for—“ Sergeant Donovan says. “Freak’s here again, the dead one.”

 She’s sensitive, more so than she lets on.

“I know, I asked him,”says Lestrade.

“We won’t speak,” Sherlock says to Donovan, not so quietly, “of your liaison with a certain no-longer-living forensics 'expert' under a certain bridge in Catford.”

Donovan makes a face at him.

“Last night,” Sherlock says, tips her a wink. “Twice.”

“Bloody ghost.”

Well, yes.

**~**

In life, Julia Stoner had an unpleasant stepfather and a concerned sister; an estate full of the wild and exotic, carvings, reptiles, monkeys, chinoiserie, big cats, a (real) ghost cat from the Himalaya.

In death she has a locked bedroom, an unpleasant stepfather and a concerned sister, a lot of blood that Sherlock says isn’t hers.

The truth though-- the dead know there are no locked rooms. It’s all permeable. If the afterlife isn’t deadbolted then what is.

I’m a doctor and a soldier, or I was; I haven’t forgotten. I knew, know, how to kill, how to revive too.

That helps.

**~**

London, living and dead, alive with the fire of sunset. Sherlock stands on the roof of Barts with the wind spiderwebbing his hair.

_I almost died a number of times._

_I think you were there._

“It’s not her blood,” Sherlock says to me, though I’m not there.

“That’s not how she died.”

**~**

‘Underworld’ is a bit of a misnomer.

We aren’t exactly below or beneath but between, between and around and through, twining like vines, I guess, through time. When we pass something it wrenches and we turn, turnstiles, living and dead, living and dead. Someone lifts their head, an argument starts or ends, birds startle. A shower of clues, evidence.

The thing is, memories are unpredictable and time is circular, layered, twined, a helix.

It’s hard to say what you know and when you know it from.

Sherlock could tell you better.

**~**

I can tell you this: I was alone. I was so alone.

Sherlock gave me something to be dead for.

**~**

Ghost cats have claws. Ghost snakes have their own poisons.

The dead can die. They can die again.

It’s something I’ve learned more than once.

“Oh, bloody hell. Sherlock!”

I find him barely dead, not alive, one limp arm on either side of the divide, river currents turning his hair to water, eyes to mineral.

I haul him up, breathe death into him; again, again, until he gasps and coughs up a string of vanadium oxyanions, some Latin, the constellation Hydra.

“Damn it.”

“I’m all right,” he says.

**~**

Sherlock still has a pulse.

(He says I do too, though I can’t feel it myself.)

I used to be pants at poetry (so I’m told), but here’s the thing.

I’m better at metaphor, here.

My heart was a locked room. So was his, apparently.

That’s not true, anymore.

**~**

He takes liberties here. We both do. Being without bodies isn’t the same as being without desire.

I’d never seen a soul (and I'd seen souls, though I didn't know it) well, as beautiful as his. 

If we’d been alive we might have wasted a lot of time. As ghosts: some protests seem beside the point.

He takes my arm and pulls me over the line between the living and the dead, kisses me when we reach the other side of the grey river, all of London, both Londons, the lights of Westminster glimmering in the fog.

**~**

The blood in the room was astounding, even for us.

“Blood’s not human, though the chemistry’s close,” Sherlock said. “Mutilation occurred after death. She died from envenomation, hybrid viper of some sort, half-dead. That explains the stippling. Look here, these marks. The stepfather. Didn’t want her to know he was already a ghost.”

“Motive?”

“Greed, of course. Look at those vases. Tedious.”

Not nearly so vicious a motive as love.

**~**

Julia’s sister cries, strokes the head of the ghost cat. Lestrade arrests the stepfather, jurisdictional conflicts be damned.

The people we love are, well, I found it difficult to say that word in life, but … the thing is you carry them, or you carry some of them, but not always the ones you expect. They aren’t heavy. Their sadness can be but they aren’t. It’s difficult to explain. It took a while to figure it all out. You remember some things, but not all, not always the most important ones. You keep looking for those, Sherlock says, but you can’t just look, you have to observe.

He’d know.

**~**

“John,” Sherlock says, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

He plays the violin, makes sounds that well, it’s hard to describe. When he plays there are pictures, echoes, reflections. A lake of bees. A waterfall. A plane taking off. A rooftop. Chalk cliffs and green fields and sunshine.

It’s like seeing and speaking at once, and singing. It’s both future and past. It’s difficult to describe.

**~**

But let me tell you a story.

I died, and I met a man who already lived there. He seemed inhuman, but more human than anyone, the most fantastic being I’d ever known. He saw things I didn’t think any person could, and it wasn’t being a ghost that made him like that. I saw in him the memory, the anticipation of, forgiveness, and a heart that wanted to stay hidden, stay still, but couldn’t. 

I saw more than I ever thought I would.

**~**

“Tea?” Sherlock asks.

The sky outside the window, over our Marylebones, is luminous.

It’s autumn now, but we can’t be sure.

**~**

It’s a myth that the dead are cold.

“Did we know each other when we were alive?” I ask him. It’s not the first time.

“Must have,” Sherlock says. His hand is warm over mine.

There’s always a sense of déjà vu when he says it, a voice in my ear, “not dead, not dead.” The clink of glasses and music. A beautiful woman with a sharp, heart-shaped face, maybe more than one. A bullet. A ring.

I take a sip of our shared jasmine, look at the great river from this side, from the side that sees and knows, that is beyond, smile at him over the wavering table at Lee Ho’s, the best Chinese in this London, in all the Londons.

We solve crimes. I write about it. We’re dead.

Maybe someday we’ll remember.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Poe for [Liz](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/pseuds/professorfangirl).  
> Black feathers for [Jude](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wiggleofjudas/pseuds/wiggleofjudas).  
> Thanks to [ Moranion](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Moranion/works), for being eager, and [quarryquest](http://quarryquest.livejournal.com/), for genius loci.
> 
> “By the aid of these we then busied our souls in dreams --reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of the true Darkness. Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm and arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.—Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue


End file.
